Site Mobile Navigation

Marcel Marceau, Renowned Mime, Dies at 84

Marcel Marceau, the wiry French mime who mostly performed as the chalk-faced Bip and did much to revive the art of pantomime, died Saturday in France. He was 84.

He died in the southwestern French town of Cahors, where he had moved after retiring from the stage in 2005, said Alexander Neander, a former student and personal assistant.

Since 1946, when he began his silent career, Mr. Marceau had performed an average of 200 shows a year, most of them abroad, where he was more highly praised than in his native France. His repertory changed little over the decades, but he played to full houses in the United States, Germany and other European countries, Australia and Japan, where he was deemed “a national treasure.”

“At a time when two generations of younger mime artists have rebelled against his brand of classical mime,” Anna Kisselgoff wrote in The New York Times in 1999, “Mr. Marceau remains a model, not a fossil. Anyone who has never seen the staples of the repertory with which Mr. Marceau has toured the United States since 1955 should beat a path” to his performances.

His acts included “Creation,” in which the start of the world began with a fluttering of his long fingers as fish and birds, and ended with Adam and Eve skulking out of Eden. In “Youth, Maturity, Old Age and Death,” he depicted in four minutes the joy and pathos of life more succinctly and dramatically than many novelists and playwrights were able to do in hundreds of pages. He began folded into himself, an embryo, then strutted boldly, then crumpled and knotted himself into shrunken death.

“The Tribunal” cast him as the accused, judge, jury and executioner. In another sketch, one of his hands played evil, the other good, twisting and struggling until they combined in prayer. In other staple sketches, he conjured an invisible wind to struggle against and an invisible cage to hold him in as he fought to escape.

Photo

Marcel Marceau in 2003.Credit
Laurent Emmanuel/Associated Press

It was during the New York theater season of 1955-6 that Mr. Marceau became, in a phrase he disliked, an international success. After a tour of Canada, he appeared in a program titled “An Evening of Pantomime” that opened Off Broadway, at the Phoenix Theater. The critics raved. Walter Kerr, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, said Mr. Marceau “should be snared with one of his own imaginary butterfly nets and trapped inside the proscenium of an American theater for the entire season, and perhaps for the rest of his natural life.”

The show was such a hit that it moved to a Broadway theater, the Ethel Barrymore, and went on to tour the country. Mr. Marceau would return to the United States every year for most of his career.

In 1970 the French government named him a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for cultural affairs. And in 1978 Jacques Chirac, then the mayor of Paris, established a subsidy for Mr. Marceau’s school for mimes, which went on to produce hundreds of performers.

Yesterday President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said of Mr. Marceau’s death, “France loses one of its most eminent ambassadors.”

Mr. Marceau, who could be voluble in interviews, once said of his pantomime: “Mostly I think of human situations for my work, not local mannerisms. There is no French way of laughing and no American way of crying. My subjects try to reveal the fundamental essences of humanity.”

A slender man who was 5 feet 9 inches tall, Mr. Marceau had just started out in mime when he invented Bip, the character who wore a stovepipe hat with a red flower. He was inspired in part by Italian commedia dell’arte, with the name playing off Pip in Dickens’s “Great Expectations.”

“This character Bip is a funny, sad fellow,” Mr. Marceau once observed, “and things are always happening to him that could happen to anybody. Because he speaks with the gestures and the movement of the body, everyone knows what is happening to him, and he is popular everywhere — Scandinavia, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Austria, wherever he has traveled.”

Photo

Marceau as his famous Bip character in 1955, the year he first found stardom in New York with a show called An Evening of Pantomime.Credit
The New York Times

Mr. Marceau also painted; sketched lithographs, many of Bip; and wrote children’s books. He appeared in several movies, including “Barbarella” with Jane Fonda. He spoke just once in his performing career, in Mel Brooks’s “Silent Movie.” He said, “No.”

Marcel Marceau was born Marcel Mangel, of Jewish parents in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923. His father, a butcher, was deported to a concentration camp by the Germans in 1944 and never returned. Marcel moved to Paris, with a new surname and false identification papers. Until the liberation of Paris, he worked in the Resistance, hiding Jewish children from the Gestapo and the French police, who helped round up Jews for deportation.

In 1944 he joined the French army, and the next year, while stationed in Germany, he gave his first public performance as a mime for an audience of some 3,000 American soldiers.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

After the war Mr. Marceau attended the acting school run by Charles Dullin at the School of Dramatic Art in the Sarah Bernhardt Theater in Paris. He planned to become a speaking actor, but he studied under Etienne Decroux, a master of miming, who had taught the noted mime Jean-Louis Barrault. Mr. Barrault invited Mr. Marceau to join his theater company, and the rest was silence.

Success followed quickly. In 1949 Mr. Marceau formed his own company, and his reputation grew around Europe. His relationship with French audiences was more complicated. In 1955 at the prestigious Olympia Theater in Paris, performing on a bill between the young crooner Charles Aznavour and the jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet, he received “the most caustic reception of his career,” according to the newspaper Liberation. The audience chatted during his performance. “He never understood the relative coldness of the French toward him,” the paper said.

But that year he toured North America and was lionized, giving rise to his worldwide popularity and even leading to a greater degree of esteem in his native France. In Hollywood he played to acclaim for six weeks and was proud that Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper and the Marx Brothers came to see him. Harpo Marx, also a silent performer, became a friend.

Mr. Marceau, who once compared himself to Picasso as an artist of enduring vitality, would continue touring internationally into his 80s, missing few performances and spending his off time with his family in a 300-year-old house outside Paris. He had two sons, Michel and Baptiste, by his first marriage, to Huguette Mallet, which ended in divorce. His second marriage, to Ella Jaroszewicz, also ended in divorce. He had two daughters, Camille and Aurélia, by his third wife, Anne Sicco, whom he later divorced. All four children survive him.

Up until his retirement in 2005, he continued to defend his art form and his contribution to it.

“Of course, I have had many imitators,” he said in a 1999 interview with The South China Morning Post. “And I am aware of the jokes about mime. But if you love your art, you just do it. Time will judge me.”

Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Paris and Campbell Robertson from New York. James F. Clarity, a longtime reporter for The Times, died last week.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Marcel Marceau, World-Renowned Mime With a Classic Repertory, Dies at 84. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe